European Union: in no fit state to lead

The European Union is failing to offer the world a different social and financial model to that of the deregulated United States. And the US itself is impoverished because of this lack of an alternative.

EUROPEAN social institutions and aspir ations for an independent role in world affairs are threatened by rampant United States’ power, Anglo-Saxon economics and European Union enlargement. These are all long-term forces, but already have enough strength to paralyse European institutions and subject the continent internally to corporate-led globalisation and externally to US leadership, as the White House now calls its imperial role. This is not the Europe that the world needs.

Because the EU is now the only global entity with an economic weight and political potential equal to that of the US, it has in principle the best possibility of defying the US. This should not be a question of making Europe more like the US (a process that has already gone too far) but ensuring that Europe represents a different model, based on social justice, and that on the international stage it frees itself from the chariot wheels of President George Bush’s policies of conquest.

Europe has an opportunity for a creative response to challenges. US leadership is in deep difficulties, above all in Iraq and the Middle East. And the sterile formula of Europe’s grotesquely-named Growth and Stability Pact has been breached by the EU’s two core states, breaking with the rule of the European Central Bank (ECB) and its disastrous monetarist dogmas.

European leaders’ current responses to the impasse of US strategy in Iraq and the crisis of EU monetary governance do not measure up to the opportunities, but weaken Europe and betray the hopes of those around the world who would like a check on the US. Washington’s allies within Nato protest publicly or privately about US unilateralism, but then endorse its consequences. These states voted in the UN to give the US occupation of Iraq unwarranted post-facto legitimacy.

As the US gets deeper into trouble, it will again expect its reluctant but meek allies to send troops, put their citizens in harm’s way to contain a dangerous situation and help Bush (...)

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* Robin Blackburn is professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School University, New York. He is an editor of New Left Review and author of ’Banking on Death or Investing in Life: the History and Future of Pensions’ (Verso)

(1) The structural funds account for a third of the EU budget and benefit all its members, if unevenly; they relate to development, agriculture, fisheries and social funds.The cohesion fund benefits the four least developed members, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Ireland.

(2) James K Galbraith, Pedro Conceicao and Pedro Ferreira, “Inequality and Unemployment in Europe”, New Left Review, London, September-October 1999.

(3) Created by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the present European social fund, in collaboration with member states, invests in programmes to improve the professional skills and opportunities of EU citizens. But its budget, one third of the structural funds (not including the cohesion fund), is only €62.5bn for 2000-2006, far from real needs.

(4) In November 1993, when the Maastricht Treaty came into effect, the EEC changed its name to the European Union.